


Four Unbroken Heartbeats

by ben8615



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Autism, Autism Spectrum, Crying, F/M, Gen, Hypersensitivity, I'm a fairly bad writer, Meltdown, Sensory Meltdown, Sensory Overload, Snot and other gross stuff if anyone wants to nope out, Time Lords are douchbags, Vomit, Would really appreciate some help with editing, ablism, and I know this is filled with mistakes, but if someone helped me out it might actually be good., please, sensory processing disorder, sensory shutdown, shutdown, the TARDIS is awesome, unbetad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-19 14:32:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9445643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ben8615/pseuds/ben8615
Summary: Stop!It comes out as a scream, powerful and pure in his mind, but illegible out loud, more of a choked whimper, as he fights his own body to push out the sound. It thrums in his head, and he uses all his mental energy, pushing it out as harshly as he can, into every corner of his mind and out to every mind in the vicinity.---Meltdowns are never fun, especially when your unaware Allistic friends happen to be aboard.





	

The doctor wakes up, and his hair is attacking him.

 _Ah_ , he thinks, _today is not a good day_.

Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, he begins to uncurl himself, but the surface digging into his back is not the soft fluidity of his usual bed, but jarring and rough. His mind makes a sickening twirl as it tries to trace back his location, swapping out the obvious for the unknown. He lies there and lets it, curling up tighter on the harsh surface as his surroundings lay siege to his body and his mind.

It takes a pitifully long time for reality to right itself, but even as events start to make sense, the sickness stays. His last memory was tinkering in the tardis’ underbelly, fighting off nightmares with rabid interests. He must have fallen asleep there, letting the constant crying of the console filter into his subconscious throughout the night. 

It’s screaming still, noises usually ignored to a certain extent join the barrage breaking in his brain.

His usually friendly clothes, the bowtie he loves so strongly. They’ve turned against him now, choking him, itching every crevice on his screaming skin. He needs to take them off, rip them to shreds and make them scream in return, but that involves uncurling and then rolling onto his front and then pushing himself to his knees and then…

A groan gurgles out from his lungs, and he lets the noise fill him, the pressure it creates granting a fleeting moment of comfort. As his breath teeters off, he gasps the groan back, keeping the noise as continuously present as possible. It’s not a pure groan, it wavers and gravels with his hearts and pains, but if anything, that makes it all the more soothing.

The tardis shifts, hitting some turbulence in time and space, and the flimsy layer of sanity is shattered into shards of sensory stimulation. The tardis wirrs, the noise piercing through the doctor’s brain. He is rolled to the side, and every inch of his body is on fire. His groaning flips into a scream, mixed in with a harsh sob, and dam, the pressure of crying feels soo good, even though he fights it on principal. The water down his face lends another level of torture, and he’s crying in earnest now.

Why won’t everything. _Just_.

_**Stop!** _

It comes out as a scream, powerful and pure in his mind, but illegible out loud, more of a choked whimper, as he fights his own body to push out the sound. It thrums in his head, and he uses all his mental energy, pushing it out as harshly as he can, into every corner of his mind and out to every mind in the vicinity.

The tardis echoes the agony back to him, and she shrieks to a halt, giving him one last burst of brain battering bother before the world finally, finally loses some of its weaponry.

The outside world is quiet now, incredibly silent, but the Doctor’s breathing grates his eardrums to shreds. His heartbeats pound in tandem with his throbbing skull. His sobbing, quieter now, pours mucus and mess onto his face. His skin is still flaying him alive, like open sores drenched in salt. He activates his respiratory bypass, and that grants some relief, but his breathlessness removes the pressure from his chest that he was relying on to stay grounded to reality. He pulls his knees tighter to his chest, trying to tune out his skin’s screeching at every slight movement. The slimy liquids are still leaking out onto his face, and he gags, and then he’s vomiting onto his favourite clothes, the smell and the texture only leading to another upchuck, and he gags, again and again, until only bile is left to burn his throat.

\---

“Rory,” she screams, and the sound scrapes away at the slivers of cellular sanity. The Doctor groans, and, oh, that was what was missing, the beautiful groaning sound that tethered his lungs to three dimensions. A hand brushes his shoulder, stoking the flames, and he bucks hard against it, groan lifting into so far undiscovered registers. The hand disappeared, but the phantom stayed present, and the Doctor wanted to rip it off with steel wool, but like taking off his clothes, the steps in-between himself and his objective crumble before his thoughts. How could he do things when he can’t even open his eyes against the barrage of light lingering past his eyelids.

“Doctor?” The voice is mumbling again, but the words won’t translate into sense, they slip past comprehension. The Doctor curls himself tighter, and flicks some attention in the direction of the tardis’ mind. He doesn’t know if she’ll understand what he’s trying to communicate, not when he doesn’t understand it either, but the voice stops, so he stops thinking about it.

The semi-silence is only temporary, though, because then there are two voices, muttering on just the wrong side of comprehension. He picks up “puzzle piece?” before giving up on words entirely. He knows he’s lost time, but he can’t tell how much. The smell of his own vomit is still cloying his forehead, but he seems to be coming down from it now. His skin is raw, but it’s losing its burning quality, and he finds himself shivering, not just from cold but from a piercing weariness that these events always leave in their wake.

“Come on Doctor, up you get.” A man’s voice this time, and the words filter through in colloquial Gallifreyan, understandable even to five-year-old time lords. The tardis is probably translating. He goes to answer, but even the groans have abandoned him now, and as he peels open his putrid mouth, barely a whisper makes itself known. He crinkles his brow in frustration, and eyes still creased tight shut he opens his mouth wider, pushes harder, but only a wheeze sound. He lets his head drop back to the floor, the bash bringing a sensation to his frustration.

“No, no, Doctor, don’t do that. It’s okay, you don’t have to talk,” now a woman’s voice, Amelia’s, a voice this regeneration can’t fail to recognise. The Doctor’s mind is tricking back into reality, the settings beginning to lay themselves into sense. He’s curled up under the tardis’ engine, covered in snot and vomit, with two Ponds in the near vicinity. A feeling crashes into him, replacing the emotional detachment and confusion with shattering shame. God, they’ve seen him like this. They’re not the first companions to catch an Episode, but they are the first to catch him since he murdered his own civilisation, and his loneliness makes this worse, somehow. He doesn’t have the mental energy required to work out why, but the shame is there, and it is so strong, not nearly as bad as experiencing sensory overload, but definitely not a welcome conclusion.

There’s hands on him again, and he jerks away, but this touch is strong, pressing down on his shoulders rather than his skin, and his senses fight it with less brutality. Then the hands pull and he’s being tugged out from his safety, out into uncategorised surroundings, and his voice box finally finds the time to move, letting out a high pitched keening noise that does nothing to dampen his shame. He can’t stand the darkness, can’t stand not orientating his mind through sight.

He cracks his eyes open, systems jumping for a renewed attack, to find that every flickering console light is off. The console room is painted in dim browns, as inoffensive as the shading on his favourite bow-tie. He is curled on the floor, but now out from under the wires of the tardis’ underbelly, and the dim and simple lighting soothing the area allows him to open his eyes the whole way. He blinks them, once, twice, feeling the crumminess left behind by an overabundance of salt. He feels disgusting, tired, his whole body is throbbing with aches, but the worst of it seems to have passed. Taking a couple of test breaths, he manoeuvres his shaking limbs until he’s in an approximation of a seated position. He runs a hand through his hair, before taking another breath and finally yielding to the one task he was trying to avoid.

He lifts his gaze up to the two humans crouching over him. The Ponds’ faces are soft in the tardis’ light, and the Doctor’s brain can’t handle attempting to decode their expressions at this point, but neither of them seem to be crying, which is good.

“Hey, Doctor,” Amy murmurs, and bless the tardis, the words are still coming through to him in colloquial Gallifreyan. He goes to speak again, but all that comes out is a soft groan. He rests his head on his crummy hands, too tired to be frustrated by his body’s refusal to communicate.

There’s a hand on his elbow, and it takes his sluggish body a moment to remember to flinch away, but again, this touch is firm, and then Rory is heaving him up, hands on both elbows as Amy steadies his side.

“C’mon, that’s it,” Rory encourages quietly, “Just got to get you up the stairs, then we can sit you down in a wheelchair your lovely tardis provided us with. Alright?”

\---

“Doctor?” The Doctor jerks, widening his eyes, but not yet focussing them in on his surroundings. He’s lost time again, and he statues himself as his time sense wibbles and wobbles itself back to sideways.

He blinks, once, twice, then batters his brain into reality. He wriggles his left hand, and finds it encrusted with sludge. His right hand doesn’t respond to his commands, which confuses him, so he searches for it and finds it pressed under his body. He blinks again, then forces his eyes into a rough approximation of existence. There’s a deep blue tone weighing down his surroundings, and it pushes out the carbon dioxide his lungs had been latching on to. Oh, ooh, that’s what breathing feels like! A hum builds in his throat, but the desert cracks it into a cough.

“Easy, easy, it’s okay,” the voice sounds again, and the Doctor’s brain backflips. He lurches his body over to lie on his back, then fights out breathing as the world flummoxes around. It’s then that the Doctor realises that he exists fully in the three spatial dimensions, a feeling that has been fleeting at best for the past couple of days. He flicks his eyes open yet again, shoving his headache off to the side, and this time the hum succeeds in breaking past his throat. He’s covered up to his chin in a light blue blanket, but its sweet colour juxtaposes its density. It weighs down his everything, and his cells let out a synchronous sigh. This blanket is never, ever, leaving his sight ever again.

His brain has stuttered down to only semi-regular imploding, so the flicker of movement in the corner of his right eye brings treacle bubbles of curiosity, rather that tsunamis of terror. He tracks his eyes in the direction of the movement, and catches Amy and Rory, both sat to the side of his bed. He flickers his mouth into a smile, before furrowing his brow when he notices Rory’s hands. They’re fumbling through a litany of movements, and it takes the Doctor a moment before he feels his face split into a true grin. Rory’s signing, and it seems this regeneration is fluent.

 _you want drink?_ Rory’s hands read, and he accompanies the last sign with a head-tilt that the Doctor knows signifies questioning. He hums solid, strong, and the message translates, because then Rory is flowing a cup up to his mouth. He closes his eyes, and lets Rory position the kind glass against his mouth. The water vomits at first, but it settles into crystal, and then the Doctor breaths, really really breaths, and life clicks itself back into place. He drags his hands out from the brilliant blanket, and squashes the glass into his own hands, gulping down the remainder. He shoves the glass off to the side, trusting someone to take care of it, and begins to work himself up on shaky limbs. Rory’s hands slip under his back, and it isn’t fire or hell, just help.

When he’s in a semi-seated position, he shakes out his patchy hair, and hides his trembling hands under his thighs. Rory places a hand near his eyes, and the Doctor slips his gaze up to meet his two faithful companions.

 _you okay?_ Rory signs, hands wondering around the question for a moment before settling into understanding. 

The Doctor nods, once, twice, three times, four times, and then stops himself with a brown-red grunt. He opens his mouth, finds a block, and fights it.  
“Iiiiarrrantttttttttthmmmmmmm,” he starts, before huffing and knifing past Amy’s wide eyes and Rory’s headshakes. “Iiiiiiiiim auwkeeyyyyyyyy. Iiiiiimm ohwkey. Iiim owkaey. Owkey. Ohhhkay. I-I’m okay, I’m okay. Hmmmmmmnnnnnnn.” and then he’s grinning, feral, and he presses down his hands before giving in and letting them fly. It’s not like they don’t already know.

 _Amelia I talk?_ Rory questions, and the Doctor’s nodding, scrunching his face in green groans. 

“Okay,” Rory starts, before licking his lips exploding out a bit of air. “Okay. That’s good. Alright. What do you need? What can we do to help? And Doctor – ” Rory lets out a small noise, and the tardis translates it at pained, “Doctor, why didn’t you tell me? Or us? I’m a nurse! I could have helped before it got that bad! I – ” Amy snaps a hand up to shackle Rory’s leg, and he cuts off.

Rory fixes an [apology] look onto his face, but the Doctor holds up a hand.

“I – I – hmmmmm – I – grrrrr. Waaaiiittt.” He clenches fists, digging the scruffs of nails into his palms. “I” stop “diiiiidnooowt” stop “teeeell” stop “yewwwww” stop “becawzzzzz – hrnnnnnergh!” He gives up, releasing a flurry of clipped signs.

_I want [negative] you know. My friend friend friend [past] understand [negative] Autism. Time man man man [past] hate Autism. Say he time man [negative]. And I friend friend friend scare. S-A-R-A-H cry. I want [negative] you sad and scared and cry. I HATE sick! HATE!_

He gives a grand finale of a fist to his head, but Rory lunges to grab his arm before he can follow it up. The Doctor whines, low and razor-y and carpet-y, and Rory releases him.

“Doctor!” he smooths, and his voice sounds crystal and blue and deep water even though there’s [fear]. “I’m sorry, Doctor,” he continues, “I only know a few basic signs, so I didn’t get most of that.”

The Doctor twitches his left lip, but before he attempts verbal communication again, Amy pushes herself up. She isn’t as blue as Rory is being, but she keeps her usual fire cool as she settles down next to the Doctor and pulls him close and tight. 

Through all the gross clog matting the Doctor’s skin, the hug resonates, and he finds himself relaxing, the bone-deep exhaustion rearing its head. Amy brings a hand up to stroke the Doctors hair, but it grasses, and he bats it away, and watches it plop back into her lap.

“Tardis,” Amy soothes, “translate the Doctor’s words, please.”

The tardis pokes a gentle complaint at the Doctor, but he bats her aside. A soft hum graces the room, before the Doctor’s message buzzes out.

“I didn’t want you to know.” The Doctor hears his voice intone. “None of my old companions understood Autism. The time lords hated it. ‘He’ll never make it as a time lord,’ they used to say. And I always scare my friends. I made Sarah cry. I didn’t want to do the same to you. I hate meltdowns. I hate them.”

The words shut off, and static pink silence fills the space. The Doctor keeps his eyes on his hands. He’s looking forward to washing them. They’re crusted yellow and red and translucent. He hears a snicker from next to him, and shifts his eyes to Amy’s lap. Her hand has disappeared. It’s wrapped around her mouth, and her eyes say [mirth]. He feels yellow confusion, and lets it sit on his brow.

“I’m sorry,” Amy blurts, around stunted giggles, “I swear I’m not laughing at you, and this is not the right time, and not appropriate. It’s just, you picked two humans that could understand better than the majority of Earth, and you didn’t even tell us!”

The Doctor’s yellow stays pale and strong, and creases his eyebrows further.

“Our best friend growing up was on the spectrum,” Rory explains, and he moves to settle on the doctor’s left. “We’ve dealt with more overloads that either of us could hope to count.”

“Her name’s Melody.” Amy adds, “Our friend, I mean. Maybe you’ll get the chance to meet her one day.”

The Doctor takes the time to process this information, letting his mouth drop open to signify his shock. Oh. Okay. Well, this is a good thing, right?

“So – ” he coughs out, “So, you’re not scared?”

Amy sighs, pulling him even tighter. He lets his head fall to her shoulder. 

“Meltdowns are always scary, no matter how many times you see them,” she starts. “I’m sure you can agree. But we’re not scared because we think that they’re weird or because we’re confused. We were just worried that you could hurt yourself. But don’t ever think that that worry means we don’t – ” she pauses, looking over the Doctor to catch her husband’s gaze, “that we don’t love you, Raggedy man. Okay?”

The Doctor studies her face, requesting a translation from the tardis. [Concerned] she reads, but [sincere].

“Yes,” he nods, swallowing the lump in his throat, “Okay, Amelia. Okay, Rory.” Not sure if he should continue, he lets the conversation drift, lets the other tether it.

“Good,” this time it’s Rory speaking, “I’m glad you understand that. Now, I don’t think you’re very comfortable. You’re still messy from the meltdown. Would you like to get washed up now?”  
The Doctor just wants to sleep, but he knows that he needs to get clean to prevent waking up in a similar state to last time.

“Yup!” he pops, enjoying the feel of the P in his mouth, revelling in the speech that’s filtering back in.

“Okay, we’ll stay in here [question]?” Rory asks, grabbing the Doctor’s shoulder and steadying him to his feet. 

The Doctor pauses, brain floating in salmon. He knows that 21st century Earth means no help in the bathroom, but it will take his anti-fraction arms hours to be free given the fragility of his post-meltdown state.

He wavers on his feet, and Amy translates his hesitation. 

“Doctor,” she hums, “We can help you if you would like us to. Neither of us mind.”

The Doctor feels small as he nods his head, but he’s too gone for embarrassment. His companions, his friends, his Rory and Amelia take his arms and lead his stumble-y feet over the caressing carpet and through the coral door into the bathroom.

The tardis smooths the bathroom lights to underwater blue, and the Doctor lets his companions lead him to and set him down on the toilet. As Rory gets a chair set up in the shower, and Amy brings the water to a time lord safe temperature, the Doctor feels his stomach solidify into safety for the first time in – in – in a long time.

Amy sends him a grin, and he knows, feels it in the tips of his toes and the depths of his dimensions.

Everything is going to be alright.

\---

_fine_

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to use the gramatical structure of AUSLAN in the Doctor's bit as much as I could, but if I was signing that, I'd be using mostly gesture and visuals rather than gramatically correct signing, but it's kinda difficult to write _stop sign followed by angry variant of go (which is closer directly translated to leave but in this case is used to mean 'I have too many emotions to sign right now'), naughty sign tepeated three times, angry sign, frustrated sideways rocking, the physically break sign first in the inverse direction and then pushed outwards instead of up and down with a much higher velocity than normal and extended out of the signing face and ended with an angsty hand-flap._ and have that mean anything at all. So basically what I'm saying is, AUSLAN is mostly visual, so direct signing to English translations never really encompass even close to the nuances of the intended message. But I can't really sign in a fanfic, so there you go.
> 
> Oh, also, I don't know British Sign Language (BSL), which I'm guessing the doctor would know, I only know Australian Sign Language (AUSLAN). But AUSLAN is kind of a coagulation of BLS and Irish Sign Language plus a couple decades of separate evolution, so whilst I wouldn't be able to understand a BLS signer, the gramatical structure shouldn't be to different? I think? If you have a look at their different fingerspelling alphabets you should get a glimps of what I mean.
> 
> Anyway. I hope you enjoyed my fic. If you're willing to beta it would be greatly appreciated. My Tumblr is Drabbles and my username is ben8615 (not very inventive, but it works).


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